Stories for June 7, 2013

Army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno on Friday relieved Maj. Gen. Michael Harrison of his duties as the commanding general of U.S. Army Japan for allegedly failing to report a charge of sexual assault.

Ariel Castro, whose Cleveland, Ohio, home allegedly became a prison for three kidnapped young women, has been indicted on 329 counts by a grand jury. Other charges include 177 counts of kidnapping and 139 counts of rape, as well as aggravated murder, a charge stemming from "the unlawful termination of another's pregnancy."

All this week on Code Switch and on air we've been digging into the findings of a survey of African-American views of their communities, finances and social lives. We conducted the poll with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

It's the "liquid lie of the desert," as writer Terry Tempest Williams describes it, a vast inland sea so salty it triggers retching when swallowed. Brine shrimp swarm its waters and brine flies blanket the shore. In the right wind and weather its putrid smell reaches Salt Lake City neighborhoods 16 miles away. Storms churn up waves that rival ocean swells.

Air National Guard Tech Sgt. Angie Johnson, who gained fame when video of her singing "Rolling in the Deep" in Afghanistan went viral, has released her first professional music video aptly called "Sing for You."

As many as six people died in a series of shootings in Santa Monica Friday, according to city police chief Jacqueline Seabrooks. The gunman was eventually shot to death in an exchange of fire with police in the library of Santa Monica College, she said at a news conference.

The San Onofre power plant has been the subject of much debate since a small radiation leak led to its shutdown in January 2012. Now, the plant is officially retired. These are your reactions to the news.

The parents of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said this week they received a letter they believe was written by their son. It's the first direct contact from Bergdahl, who has been a prisoner of war since 2009.

There's been an arrest by federal authorities who are trying to track down the person responsible for last month mailing possibly ricin-laced letters to President Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a gun control group the mayor supports.

Most health policy meetings are a dull gray snooze of business suits talking data. They seem a million miles removed from making sick people healthy. But this week in Washington, D.C., some of those meetings was enlivened by a sudden flash of color.

As President Obama and his Chinese counterpart prepare for a weekend summit in California to discuss thorny bilateral issues, a new poll shows that ordinary Americans and Chinese increasingly eye one another with suspicion.

In his most extensive comments so far on the revelations this week about the electronic data that the nation's spy agencies are collecting, President Obama told the American people Friday that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- The Obama administration on Friday proposed lifting most remaining federal protections for gray wolves across the Lower 48 states, a move that would end four decades of recovery efforts but that some scientists said was premature.

When the La Jolla Playhouse decided to stage “His Girl Friday,” they had to ask how could they make a play about reporters in 1939 Chicago connect with an audience in San Diego today? The solution involves a clever set design and plenty of doors.

The U.S. government has been collecting phone records on all Verizon customers since at least April, and probably longer. Defenders of the surveillance program say it doesn't breach privacy because it's only gathering metadata. But what exactly is metadata?

Fresh reports about the massive amount of electronic data that the nation's spy agencies are collecting "raise profound questions about privacy" because of what they say about how such information will be collected in the future, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston said Friday on Morning Edition.

The U.S. Supreme Court, on the brink of issuing two same-sex-marriage decisions, is facing a question that Margaret Marshall had to resolve for her state a decade ago, as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Her decision became the first to legalize same-sex marriage in the United States.